Thursday, October 6, 2011

[Comic title: Subliminal; alt text: Once you see it, you can't help seeing it every time. Until your body finishes metabolizing the mushrooms.]

Randy would like you all to know that he tried mushrooms for the first time the other day, and it was a very strange experience. He saw all these things he doesn't know how to describe! It was very odd, because Randy is a genius with the written word and artistic expression both. He tried very hard to make a comic that was very funny and that encapsulated the "gist" of his experience, but, well, no one is perfect. Instead he drew a Dalek with two big round holes in it, and a guy catching a baseball, and a guy wearing a Guy Fawkes mask (who is apparently Guy Fawkes himself--it is a little known fact that the Guy Fawkes mask actually originates from the mask that Mr. Fawkes wore when he tried to blow up parliament) who apparently has had two great slashes carved from his skull. The result, if you squint, could read 'FedEx.' To make sure you got the joke, he even used the same colors.

Being on mushrooms, Randy decided, was basically the same thing as lolrandom humor. But how would people know that he had done mushrooms, since he did a lot of lolrandom humor BEFORE he became a more enlightened human being???

Oh wait, he can just tell you, several times, that this is a joke about drugs (lol!!!!) because there is nothing like unnecessary text to beat you over the head with a point.

11:40 - 960 was good. It reminded my neuroatypical brain of Guy Fawkes which is 4chan. 4chan is a thing I enjoy so I enjoy this. "I HERD U LIKE REFERENCES SO I PUT A REFERENCE IN MY COMIC" -Randall, 2011

Arigatou Randall. I appreciate.

I will have to deduct a point of merit however for having color. I am not a child. I am not a child. I am not a child. I will make a list of how I am not a child:

1) I am taller than a child2) Children go to school. I do not go to school

I don't know if you're aware of this, Rob, but the discovery of the arrow in the FedEx logo is somewhat of a meme. The gist of it is to point out to idiots with no observational ability the existence of the arrow and mock them for their failure to notice it. I think this comic is meant to exaggerate that, where The Girl fails to notice an image hidden in the FedEx logo even more conspicuous than the arrow, but (the funny part!) ridicules The Boy for not seeing the arrow anyway. The drugs thing, it seems to me, was just the way Randall decided to make The Girl do it.

I don't know about the alt-text, though. I think Randall was just taking the drugs thing and running with it.

Added to the above: it's usually the liberal, geeky types who pride themselves on being liberal, geeky types, whose parents paid their way through college and who hypocritically live in a culture of conspicuous consumption and spend half their time bitching about first-world upper middle class problems like facebook not having gender-neutral pronouns while believing themselves to be superior to less enlightened people. So Randall kind of fits that to a tee.

There are different kinds of geeks. Some kinds might try drugs, some kinds don't.

The stereotypical WoW playing parent's basement dwelling geek doesn't do anything besides caffeine (maybe alcohol too, but doing any other drugs would require them actually having the social connections to acquire said drugs).

Of course Randall isn't the WoW playing kind of geek, but he reminds me of the a certain group of geeks in college who lived in the substance free dorms. Doctor Unisex sees him differently, fair enough I guess.

Randall's previous substance related strips haven't exactly made him seem like he has much direct experience though. 790's reaction to LSD ("oh god, spiders") might have struck me as plausible before I'd tried any psychedelics, but now it comes across as coming from somebody who's never done acid. In 617, while Randall grudgingly acknowledges SCIENCE in the alt text, he seems to think tequila has magic super-drunkenness properties (probably because he believes there is a mescaline containing worm in the bottom of the bottle). I don't think he drinks very often either.

Yeah, to me Randall always came across as the kind of person who thinks that doing drugs makes you WACKY and SO RANDOM but never actually does drugs himself and wouldn't really like hanging out with people who do.

so ... is he going to post a comic today or what? i mean, i'd be cool if xkcd never updated again, but i'm kind of wondering. did steve jobs's death send him into such a panicked state that he can no longer draw stick figures for two minutes every other day?

I suggested I'd be putting up a fourth comic tonight, but I was up until about 8 this morning drawing the Steve Jobs comic (and, before that, getting a bunch of new t-shirt designs done, which I'm really excited about). What with the pigeon debacle and a bunch of doctor visits today (nothing bad), I think I'm too sleep-deprived to do anything but argue about dinosaur taxonomy on the internet. Accordingly, I'm just going to call #961 an early Friday comic, and start fresh after I get some sleep.

As an MIT kid, I can say that drug use is moderately common at MIT, but, in my experience, those who use drugs aren't so idiotic about their motivations. Granted, I don't have a very broad social circle, so maybe I haven't stumbled upon the douchebag clique yet.

lots of them aren't so idiotic about it, true. but there's a couple who don't seem interested in the recreational aspects so much as they seem to basically think that it's a neat brain-hack. these are the sorts of people who use the word "hack" to refer to any clever trick, and who think that being a "hacker" makes you automatically good at everything.

oh, for some reason i thought the eternal flame one was the normal wednesday comic and he hadn't made one since. didn't get that it was supposed to be dedicated to steve jobs or whatever ... i actually thought it was put up before the news of his death.

Since I don't use drugs or have much interest in computer science (some students of which seem to throw the word "hack" around a lot), I suppose I don't have much chance to speak to people who might behave as you say. Honestly, though, I wouldn't really be surprised by the existence of a silly little subculture like that; I'm only a Freshman.

I don't know if it's a subculture, but I met a handful of people like that when I was in the area. The thing about colleges is there's all sorts of weird subcultures and echo chambers running around. Try not to get caught up in them and you'll come out all right.

I wasn't deriding any discipline. I mentioned computer science students only because the few I've interacted with said "hack" a bizarrely large number of times.

Also, financial aid means I go to MIT for a relatively minuscule amount of money. In fact, almost of all of these sorts of schools seem to have pretty severe FA packages. Harvard charges you nothing (I think) if your income is less than $60,000 per year, and it charges 10% of the tuition if your income is $60,000 - $180,000 per year.

Observation: In every even moderately geeky forum on the Internet there are at least two people who currently go to MIT: one who casually namedrops it and the second to make a "me too" remark and try to engage in conversation about MIT.

Conclusion: there are hundreds of thousands of people currently at MIT.

i always preferred the term "echo chamber" for the collegiate cultural phenomenon. it encapsulates the fact that everything that happens within it gets amplified, so people who are only mildly annoying by nature become incredibly annoying because everything they do gets reinforced tenfold

This reminds me of "You either need to get out more, or less." and "His mind is not a normal place" or whatever. Randy needs megan around to affirm his belief that he is quirky and inexplicable to other people.

How'd the arrow in the real Fedex logo become a meme? It's OUTLINED IN DARK BLUE. It's scarcely hidden in any way. If you cannot see the arrow that's not FedEx being clever, that's their graphics money being wasted.

Actually, looking over their logos, sometimes they do just let it be defined by negative space, sometimes they fill it in in grey, and sometimes they heavily outline it in dark blue. That said, I do think you almost have to do drugs to not see even the no-hints version.

The Soviets achieved in 20 years what took America 200 years. Then Khrushchev appeared and the Union's philosophy turned from "be as good as you can" to "watch and copy". Like HP under zombie Carly Fiorina, they were doomed.

And blaming the famine on Stalin was one of the West's best propaganda wins.

3:09, do you realize that they were able to achieve it because it had already been done? Revolutionizing a country from nothing to a superpower had already been accomplished. America made technology to make the first advances into a superior world when all the Soviet Union had to do was stop what they were previously doing and start modernizing.

It's like two men building a house, but one figures out the concepts of power tools while he goes and it takes him 10 years to do so. Another man glances over and takes a power tool, completing the rest of the house in a matter of weeks. Yes, he "advanced" faster, but not in an innovative way.

the pseudo term "Randalizing" has come up several times during the short duration that i have been viewing this blog and i cant help but think that by the definition that i can come up with (referencing an XKCD comic to enhance the seeming intellect of a website or article(correct me if I'm wrong)) is the creation of a blog that picks apart XKCD ( that i may remind you is a bi weekly comic that has run almost 1000 strips (I mean Fuck!)) in a way a form of randalizing to an almost extreem degree.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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